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Peter Gratton

@petergratton.bsky.social
2.3K followers 780 following 5.5K posts

Peter Gratton, PhD, is an editor at Investopedia, book author, and professor of philosophy. He covers political theory, technology, finance, and political economy. Views are definitely my own.

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Peter Gratton @petergratton.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Scammers now using AI to keep going in coursework to get aid semester after semester. (Imagine starting as a fraudster but getting a degree in counseling or something.) www.investopedia.com/congress-tak...
investopedia.com
Financial Aid Scams: ‘Ghost Students’ Transition From Disappearing to Graduating
Colleges and the government are fighting the evolving problem of “ghost students,” trying to prevent scammers from receiving financial aid while keeping that money accessible to actual students.
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lastpositivist.bsky.social @lastpositivist.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
This is the state of the subfield of ethics in analytic philosophy.
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Josh Fruhlinger @jfruh.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
they DIDN'T REFUND her fucking TUITION?????
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Connor Ewing @cmewing.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Not you.
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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Now everything is safe and nothing is funded. The labs are clean and the researchers are desperate. The fume hoods work perfectly and no one can afford to use them. We have replaced the danger of mouth-pipetting with the danger of a generation of scientists spending their most productive years writing grants that will not be funded. This is its own form of danger, just slower and less honest than the phenol.
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Tom Ellison @123tomellison.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Imagine the vibes in the student newspaper bullpen during these email exchanges. Delectable.
A screenshot of a Dartmouth student newspaper article that says:

In an email statement to The Dartmouth on Sept. 18, Schnell wrote that he uses artificial intelligence for “language refinement, copyediting, improving clarity and organization and making writing processes more efficient,” but “review[s] the final text and take[s] responsibility for its content.”

“I develop ideas and arguments, conduct the research, evaluate the evidence and sources, determine the structure, prepare drafts and decide what appears in the final text,” Schnell wrote. “I regard these technologies as assistive tools. They do not identify the problem, design the research project, guarantee the validity of research results, interpretations, citations, conclusions or substitute for my research, intellectual judgment or authorship.”

Schnell’s Sept. 18 email statement to The Dartmouth was itself “100% AI-written,” according to a Pangram test.

In a follow-up statement about the composition of the email, Schnell wrote that he “developed the substance and wrote a draft” of the email, then “used an Al tool to assist with language and clarity, taking on several suggestions (including reworded sentences), before reading it through, making minor changes and sending it to you with my signature.”
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Robin Wigglesworth @robinwigglesworth.ft.com · 21/09/2026
(they move inversely 🫡)
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open borders now @radtranslib.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Carlo Rosseli wrote the book Liberal Socialism while he was imprisoned on Lipari. By Mussolini.
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Colson Whitehead @colsonwhitehead.com · 21/09/2026
Got an interview request from a Lithuanian journalist…you never know what you’re walking into when it comes to Eastern Europe…kinda racist sometimes...but maybe I’m being too harsh! I should check out the newspaper at least…hit the front page and — www.15min.lt/naujiena/akt...
15min.lt
Lietuvos žmogaus teisių centras apie „juodaodes“ Šilutės šventėje: „Nėra priimtina“
Rugsėjo 5-ąją Šilutėje garavo žuvienės puodai, o aplink vieną iš jų šoko virėjų komanda, apsitaisiusi juodais kostiumais ir vaizduojanti juodaodes moteris. Šis pasirodymas...
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Spooky Rin Stedecore 👻🎃 🔪 @stedeco.re · 19/09/2026
This is incredible and "but without the opposition to the Anschluss" turns it into art
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Peter Gratton @petergratton.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Someone was bound to write the “how to hedge the end of all things” piece. Anyway, tldr: diversify people. And gold.
businessinsider.com
What to do with your money if we're really heading for an AI apocalypse
While some investing experts touted cash and gold, one wealth manager said relationships will be the "asset that matters most" in a doomsday scenario.
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Justin Joque @jjoque.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
The AI bubble is first and foremost a bubble of the libidinal economy
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Peter Gratton @petergratton.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Hottest idea in retirement savings—pensions. www.wsj.com/personal-fin...
wsj.com
Exclusive | BlackRock Plans to Make the Corporate 401(k) Look More Like a Pension
The investment manager aims to overhaul target-date funds with more options for employers.
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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
I think the twist in the show is that half of the prisoners drop out halfway through and set up a startup prison experiment of their own
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Stephen Nuñez @socio-steve.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Bringing Emily Wilson back for one final job.
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Jane Coaston @janecoaston.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
This piece was fascinating, getting at a point I'd never considered: bin-Laden's entire concept about what 9/11 would do to America was just... wrong. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...
Bin Laden was equally clear about how he thought terrorism would yield his desired result. In a March 1997 CNN interview with Peter Bergen, he spoke of transferring “the battle into the United States.” In a May 2000 speech, he told supporters that the war would henceforth be waged “against the United States, in the United States.” Americans, he observed to ABC’s John Miller in 1998, cannot tolerate pain, and will react to attacks not by fighting back and blaming al‑Qaeda, but instead by asking “what their government has done that forced us to defend ourselves.” In a November 2001 interview, he hinted at a theory of political change in America: Its citizens should “take the same stand that they did previously,” when they protested the Vietnam War and the presidents who waged it.
Nelly Lahoud, a professor at the Army War College and the author of the definitive book on the Abbottabad documents, told me this political pipe dream was bin Laden’s whole plan: “to replicate the anti–Vietnam War movement of the United States, to get the American public to put pressure on the U.S. government to withdraw its forces from the Middle East.” The documents reveal a man and an organization blindsided by the American reaction to the September 11 attacks. Bin Laden and his associates “didn’t think that the United States would respond by waging war,” Lahoud said. He did not contemplate or plan for the long-term occupation of Afghanistan, nor did he expect the methodical killing of his operatives in a campaign that lasted years.
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Peter Gratton @petergratton.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Just another brutal day in the world of journalism.
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Nolen Gertz @ethicistforhire.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
Breaking the law once makes you a criminal. Breaking the law as a business model makes you of "national interest"... #NihilismAndTechnology
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David S. Bernstein @dbernstein.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
It’s right there in the Constitution: “an Executive Order shall be ratified and binding when adopted by two (2) mobile apps of minimum one million downloads”
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Ana Marie Cox @anamariecox.com · 02/09/2026
Extremely funny that this retracted study claimed to prove that you can’t trust people to police their own behavior without external consequences.
Abstract
Procrastination is all too familiar to most people. People delay writing up their research (so we hear!), repeatedly declare they will start their diets tomorrow, or postpone until next week doing odd jobs around the house. Yet people also sometimes attempt to control their procrastination by setting deadlines for themselves. This paper poses three questions: (1) Are people willing to self-impose meaningful (i.e., costly) deadlines to overcome procrastination? (2) Are self-imposed deadlines effective in improving task performance? (3) When self-imposing deadlines, do people set them optimally, for maximum performance enhancement? A set of studies examined these issues experimentally, showing that the answer is "yes" to the first two questions, and "no" to the third. People have self-control problems, they recognize them, and they try to control them by self-imposing costly deadlines. These deadlines help people control procrastination, but they are not as effective as some externally imposed deadlines in improving task performance.
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Peter Gratton @petergratton.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
Wired reporter tries to figure out how accurate Pangram is; comes away wondering about the weirdness of engaging with their CEO. archive.ph/aenhj
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Constantine Sandis @csandis.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Philosophers completing the research methodology section in grant applications
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Micah @rincewind.run · 02/09/2026
donald trump is about to preside over one of the all time midterm shellackings for an incumbent party in the united states and somehow he did less electoral damage to american conservatives than canadian ones
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mcc @dryad.technology · 01/09/2026
This is the single biggest physics discovery of my entire lifetime. Or something's wrong with one of the cables. One of the two
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Matt Novak @paleofuture.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
This is pretty fucking wild. I had assumed in a worst case scenario he would target blue zip codes and toss ballots based on technicalities but this is even worse than I imagined.
Not only is this system astonishingly untested, USPS has simultaneously implemented an
impracticable zero percent failure rate.
13 When ballots are submitted to USPS in large-volume
batches, if any one ballot in the batch cannot be verified against the Portal, all ballots in that
batch will be rejected. For example, if a state election official brings a batch of 10,000 ballots to
USPS and USPS is unable to match just one of those ballots against the Portal – because, for
example, someone has recently changed their name after marriage or they’ve moved – then
USPS would refuse to mail the remaining 9,999 ballots as well. As the whistleblower notes,
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Hansi Lo Wang (he/him) @hansilowang.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
SCOOP: After the Census Bureau issued a highly unusual report tied to a President Trump-aligned think tank, the bureau’s parent agency, the Commerce Department, cut language banning political interference from its scientific integrity policy, @npr.org has learned www.npr.org/2026/08/31/n...
npr.org
Trump officials cut political interference ban after unusual Census Bureau report
After the Census Bureau issued a report tied to a Trump-aligned think tank, the bureau's parent agency cut language banning political interference from its scientific integrity policy, NPR learned.
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Daniel Sugarman @danielsugarman.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
The world's most notorious custard-pie thrower is dead. What an obituary. He got Bernard-Henri Lévy seven times.
​Known to his army of fans as L’Entarteur or Georges le Gloupier, Godin launched his career as a serial deflator of egos in 1969, when he planted a tarte à la crème on the face of the French novelist Marguerite Duras (“She has a kind of intelligence and cleverness that serves only her own vanity,” he complained), and he went on to “pie” a cast list of celebrities for sins ranging from pomposity to “choosing to function in the service of the capitalist status quo”.The same could not be said of Bernard-Henri Lévy, one of France’s “new philosophers,” whose provocative views on sex, frequent appearances on television and penchant for white silk shirts unbuttoned practically to the navel, had made him a cult figure – and one of Godin’s most satisfying victims.

Levy once declared: “I am the most gifted writer of my generation,” and often boasted of his reasonableness and tolerance, but he was forced to endure footage being repeatedly shown on French television of himself, covered in cream, during a visit to the Belgian city of Liège, trying to strangle Godin and shouting: “Get up, or I’ll kick your head in.”Noël Godin was born on September 13 1945 and came to pie-throwing after a rebellious youth in which he scandalised the priests in the confessional by speaking of his “horrible sexual life”, and was thrown out of Liège University after emptying a pot of glue over the head of a law lecturer who had helped write the constitution for the Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar.

He found work at Friends of Film, an obscure magazine published by the Belgian Catholic League. It had a tiny readership, which was just as well, as Godin made up most of his articles. In one he claimed that Louis Armstrong had once been a cannibal and had invested in a film called The Vegetables of Good Will in which Claudia Cardinale played a giant endive.

In another he conjured up a fictional blind Thai filmmaker named Vivian Pei, describing her film, The Lotus Flower Will Never Again Grow on the Edge of Your Island, in such convincing terms that an Asian film specialist travelled to Thailand in an effort to track her down.“We’re very careful not to hurt people,’’ he explained. “Well, they are hurt, but always in their amour-propre.”

In 1995 Godin published an autobiography, Cream and Punishment. His other targets over the years included the New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard (who charmed his assailant by hailing the attack as a homage to silent film), the French politician Nicolas Sarkozy, the choreographer Maurice Béjart and the Ryanair chairman Michael O​’Leary. He tended not to pick Belgian victims, he explained, because few would notice if he did.
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Robin Wigglesworth @robinwigglesworth.ft.com · 26/08/2026
Terminal levels of AI brain rot. www.wsj.com/tech/ai/situ...
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Zach Everson @zacheverson.com · 11/09/2025
Steinbeck, East of Eden
It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.
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Peter Gratton @petergratton.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
Well this will lead only to further good things on America's campuses. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/22/b...
nytimes.com
Harvard Is Selling a $699 Course Taught by A.I. Clones of Its Faculty
To create a new bootcamp for entrepreneurs, Harvard Business School made A.I. avatars of its instructors.
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Peter Gratton @petergratton.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
For Ezra Klein's latest podcast, interesting to consider the relevance of the recommendations vs. the topic—but hey, people who haven't should indeed read Gender Trouble. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...
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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 25/08/2026
I got nothing.
The most tech-savvy parents have built their own tools. Sarah Baldeo, a cognitive neuroscientist, spent the past year traveling for work, so she built a custom GPT of herself to chat with her 15-year-old son when she's unavailable. Baldeo tells me she programmed the chatbot with her personality, uploading screenshots of texts between her and her son, along with documents about her values, the family rules, and challenges she felt in parenting.

Baldeo wanted her son to ask the chatbot advice, and he did prompt it with questions he may have fielded to her, like, How do I diplomatically tell my teacher I'm overloaded with assignments? But he also asked the mombot how to convince his human mom to let him hang out at a coffee shop in Chicago in the evening — something Baldeo had been hesitant to allow.
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David Atkins @davidoatkins.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
Listening to median voters is a good reminder to hot take slingers--leftist and moderate alike--who are certain that their perfect message will unlock unprecedented victories.
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Matt Blair @mjmbca.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
I really can’t get over what a rookie mistake it is to look the Government of Canada in the eye and say “We’re gonna need you to piss off Quebec.”
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Soumaya Keynes @soumayakeynes.ft.com · 21/08/2026
And they definitely did that right?
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Emily Herring @emilyherring.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
I'm still thinking about the @currentaffairs.bsky.social article about Jimmy Fallon "Fallon acts as the high priest of a terrified optimism, his rictus grin serving as a shield against the encroaching silence of the real." www.currentaffairs.org/news/the-ban...
currentaffairs.org
The Banal Horror of Jimmy Fallon
Under the sterile blue lights of his studio, Fallon laughs endlessly at the same pseudo-jokes, rubs elbows with Trump and Sam Altman, and ushers in the death of culture.
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NOLA.com @nolanews.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
After a federal appeals court let the state law requiring the religious text in all public classrooms take effect, Louisiana’s public universities are working to hang posters of the Ten Commandments as the fall semester kicks off. bit.ly/4x9hFsw
bit.ly
How Louisiana’s law requiring Ten Commandments displays is unfolding on college campuses
After a federal appeals court let the state law requiring the religious text in all public classrooms take effect, Louisiana’s public universities are working to hang posters of the Ten Commandments as the fall semester kicks off.
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Kate Sills @katelynsills.com · 17/08/2026
lol
Patrick Wyman: She ran a Crossfit gym, which is basically a swinger's club that produces orthopedic injuries

G. Willow Wilson: This is a banging first sentence of a noir novel
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Adam Bonica @adambonica.bsky.social · 16/08/2026
There are four overlapping scandals here: 1. Fundraising spam tactics are hallmarks of elder financial exploitation 2. The Dem establishment is in on it 3. Most of what is raised goes to fundraising consultants 4. Capitulation to legal threats by NYT and The Bulwark on a fully vetted story 🧵👇
data4democracy.substack.com
Hook and Squeeze
How Democratic consultants, committees, and party leaders built a fundraising spam pipeline that funnels money from a captive pool of elderly donors into their own operations.
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Peter Gratton @petergratton.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
News from the dystopia continues.
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Lit Hub @literaryhub.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
How Hannah Arendt examined antisemitism as Hitler rose to power. buff.ly/RqoxGQT
lithub.com
As Hitler Loomed, Hannah Arendt Undertook a Deep Analysis of German Antisemitism
Hannah Arendt’s 1936 lectures in Paris, where she had spent the past year and a half, were the first signals to the émigré population at large that she still had something to say. They were her att…
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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 09/08/2026
Ifollowed sports science and related discourse for decades and there's always been an undercurrent of race science in there, but usually at something of a whisper. over the last few years there seems to be a resurgence of the very overt stuff. this post today from a fairly famous fitness influencer
screenshot post from Menno Henselmans' FB page. text says:

"There's a common intuition that black-African individuals are genetically gifted for sports and muscularity. A new preprinted study's researchers walked into this political minefield to find the truth. 40 Untrained men of African or European ancestry, based on genetic testing, completed 9 weeks of supervised resistance training."
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noam @noamchompers.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
many professors are calling it 'the least surprising result of all time'
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Joshua Erlich @joshuaerlich.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
it’s so funny that everyone on this website is obsessed with the Sex Purge because it’s bad *policy*
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Scott Imberman @imbernomics.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
Jeff Goldblum in jurassic park in shock at the naïveté of the scientists
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So Mayer @suchmayer.northsky.social · 05/08/2026
OK Odyssey stans, Monique Wittig has entered the discourse (disc-horse)? From THE LITERARY WORKSHOP, trans. Ann Jefferson @versobooks.bsky.social
held chapter on the gnomon.
In The Literary Workshop, Monique Wittig presents the "Trojan Horse' as 'a machine made of words that is doubtless sufficiently unique in history (literary history) for it to be permissible to use it here as an analogy within the space occupied by writing. And she goes on to add:
Or for it to be like the gnomon, a measuring instrument, which is said to have been the first fashioner of concepts. But a gnomon that is neither square nor any other shape, because its properties are abstract before being concrete. At any rate, I am placing this machine here on the page in order to point to its maker in the first instance, because this is how I see writers, as makers of Trojan horses.
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Schooley @schooley.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
David Cross leaning into a mic. "America, should, must, and will blow up the moon."
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Peter Gratton @petergratton.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
Getting this right onto the “to read” pile.
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Bobby Allyn @bobbyallyn.bsky.social · 01/08/2026
"It's insane. I can say for myself and 200 of my friends in finance, we're not getting anywhere near this. In another administration, this would be considered criminal.”
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snhoj 🚴⛷️🇺🇸🏳️‍🌈 @snhoj.bsky.social · 01/08/2026
I find the funniest part to be that he wrote “(JPY)”. 😂
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